


like batman though

by deniigiq



Series: Dumpster Fires Verse [10]
Category: Daredevil (TV), Deadpool - All Media Types, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: Camping, Gen, Hippies, Road Trips, Team Bonding, Team Dynamics, Team Red, Witchcraft, communing with nature, it is one-sided fear, like crystals and shit, wade and aunt may have a complicated relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-25
Updated: 2018-06-25
Packaged: 2019-05-28 12:09:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15048716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deniigiq/pseuds/deniigiq
Summary: “I don’t know about you nerds, but I have just witnessed the best version of Toxic in existence. I’m going to form a karaoke team and we are going to win everything,” she informed them.“Aunt May played Celtic Women for fifteen minutes,” Peter offered her in return for this information, “All the old people sung along.” It had been cute in a weird, hippie kind of way.They conceded that MJ was in the cool car.(Team Red goes camping)





	like batman though

**Author's Note:**

> I have given up on timelines for this series sorry y'all

Aunt May was unabashedly a hippie, new-age, urban witch type of person, and Peter adored her for it because, as a child, he’d never really had that moment when the magic in life was sucked out by some kid ratting out Santa’s secret.

No, he’d spent his early childhood hiked up into Aunt May’s arms so that he could see the kitchen window sill to help her figure out the optimal configuration of quartz and obsidian and amethyst.

Uncle Ben had thought the entire thing was a crock of shit, but he loved Aunt May for her dedication to the craft. More than once, he came in to rescue Peter from wrapping dried sage into bundles because he knew Peter didn’t like the smell. Peter remembered not wanting to participate in one of these impromptu rescue operations, despite his sneezing and coughing, and wailing on his uncle’s shoulder until Ben relented and dropped him back onto his stack of books at the kitchen table. May accused Ben of trying to steal her apprentice, and Peter had ceased his wailing at his sudden promotion from witch’s l’il assistant to full-fledged apprentice. Ben had bemoaned the corruption of his nephew, then he’d thrown open all the windows and had left them to it.

As such, once or twice every year Aunt May developed the strong need to go commune with nature. This meant camping trips all over the state in all sorts of terrible and not-terrible weather. Ben took these opportunities to teach Peter practical outdoors skills before they joined May in communing with the sounds and spirits that be.

These camping trips, combined with the piles of crystals all around their home, meant that Peter considered himself pretty well in tune with the world, even though he lived in a concrete jungle.

He and Aunt May were planning one such getaway with a handful of their close friends when Aunt May suggested that they should invite Matt and Wade and their people to go with them.

Peter agreed emphatically, not because he wanted to spend extra-curricular time with Matt and Wade, but because Matt had actually gotten hit by a car a few weeks prior (he blamed this on allergies blocking his senses) and Wade had had to regrow a few limbs due to a spectacularly failed mission in the past few days (he had no excuse whatsoever). As Matt had become something of a family lawyer and Wade was Peter’s strange super-uncle, Aunt May thought it would behoove all of them if those two got their chaotic energy sorted out.

She’d been giving Peter beads of tiger’s eye and hematite to give to these two to help mitigate their misfortune for weeks now, but Wade kept losing them and Matt was suspicious of them because paganism. Peter slipped them into the pockets of their suits when they weren’t looking. He reported this back to Aunt May and she gave a sober nod of approval at a job well done. Very cunning. Very smart.

Very witchy.

She took Peter with her to drop off some paperwork and an invite to Matt at his office and they were lucky (obviously, because Aunt May always had one of her protection bags with her) enough to get there while Foggy was.

“You should come with us,” Aunt May told Matt while he moped on his desk and Foggy flicked through the paperwork to make sure it was done properly. Foggy lit up like lighting fluid.

“Oh my god, Matty, you’ve never been camping.”

It sounded like Foggy had a hive of Matt-facts in his head which he picked through at key points in their lives to ensure Matt endured maximum suffering. Matt groaned into the desk.

“You’ve never been camping?” Aunt May repeated toward his head.

“It’s not that—” he started.

“No, Matty is a deprived orphan with no life experience,” Foggy informed her. Matt’s shoulders shook a little under the strain of his misery and his knowledge that, no matter what he said, he was now going camping. Peter wanted to pity him, except that it really would do him some good.

“Your parents never took you? No summer camp?” Aunt May pressed, deeply concerned. She was probably already making plans to make him sit under a waterfall or something.

“I’ve been camping,” Matt defended weakly. Foggy glared down at him.

“Being homeless does not count.”

“I wasn’t homeless. I was just a little confused.”

“A little? You fucking bit me when we got to the hospital.”

Matt snickered. Apparently, that was a good memory for him. Peter didn’t want to touch it.

“Come with us,” Aunt May told him brightly, “You’ll love it. It’ll help balance out your energy.”

“Or I could just go to confession?” Matt countered. Aunt May would not be deterred by organized religion.

“Pray on it,” she said.

Foggy smiled at her over Matt’s head, promising silently that they’d get back to her soon.

 

 

Aunt May was determined to feed Wade something which did not come out of a paper bag, which Wade was confused and paranoid about. He didn’t do too well with people he didn’t know doting on him, so he avoided Aunt May like his life depended on it. If he needed to dump Peter off at home following whatever dramatic wound he’d gotten that week, Wade stayed for exactly as long as it took to get him stable. Aunt May had come home from a shift early once and opened the door just as Wade went to leave and he’d slammed his spine into the doorframe to crawl around her.

May thought she deserved a special award for being on Deadpool’s no-go list. Peter didn’t tell her that Wade’s no-go list also included two tacquerias and a series of furious domesticated pets.

Hence why Wade was shaken when Peter brought her around to his apartment to invite him camping.

“You brought a stranger to my _house_ ,” Wade whispered while May assessed his aesthetic.

“She’s not a stranger, she’s my aunt and she loves you,” Peter whispered back.

Aunt May insisted that Wade come with them up north. Wade smiled and nodded and then whispered desperately in Peter’s ear.

“I’ve already done my time in the sticks, man. Don’t do this to me.”

“She _loves_ you.”

“I’m gonna get flashbacks.”

“Wade, you slept under a bridge last week.”

“That’s because I’m a troll.”

“Come be a troll with us up north.”

Wade drew back in horror.

“Oh god, they’re working together,” he whispered to himself.

May gifted him a string of hematite and told him that they couldn’t wait for him to see the cabins on the 18th. Wade accepted the beads and kept smiling and nodding because he was under the bizarre impression that Aunt May would burn his house down if he didn’t. On the way out, he gave Peter desperate eyes and mouthed, “Please don’t do this.” Peter waved cheerfully and told him to eat the bread they’d brought before it went stale.

There was nothing more satisfying than overwhelming Wade Wilson, professional agent of chaos.

 

 

“We’re gonna meet _Deadpool_ ,” Ned bubbled. MJ had lost possession over her couch cushion by foolishly giving it to Aunt May before she’d left for the store. She looked around for something else reasonably soft to throw at him.

“You’ve already met Deadpool,” Peter reminded him. “And Daredevil, you’ve met them both.”

“Yeah, but we’re gonna like properly meet this time. We’re gonna hang out.” Ned was so excited. Peter didn’t want to rain on his parade by informing him that Matt and Wade were exactly the same ghost-hunting as they would be camping. The only difference was going to be that neither of them wanted to be there.

 

 

Their group of hippies plus Ned and MJ met up with a very unhappy Matt with Foggy and Karen, who were evidently game for literally any activity which might make him miserable, at the train station. Wade had promised Peter that he’d meet them at the site. Peter made him promise Aunt May over the phone too, so he wouldn’t be tempted to bail on them unexpectedly.

They’d rented some cars for the journey, a van for Aunt May and their people and a sedan for the DD trio. MJ volunteered to ride with the Daredevil trio since she was, by then, well familiar with those guys. Matt told her he fully intended to drive to scare her away, but it didn’t work. He went to pout in the backseat and then pouted harder upon realizing that MJ was going to be sitting back there with him.

The two vehicles rolled up next to each other on the highway and Aunt May blasted terrible pop out the window as a sign of dominance. The next time they met up someone in the sedan wrenched the volume up to 11 and started blaring Smash Mouth. Half the people in the van became immediately scandalized that _they_ weren’t listening to Smash Mouth while the other half tried to contain the impulse to look up every meme ever associated with them.

Peter punched Ned’s shoulder and pointed to where Matt was obviously dying from the volume and had hidden himself under what appeared to be every blanket and coat in the car.

 

 

They stopped at a rest stop and MJ rolled up to them grinning.

“I don’t know about you nerds, but I have just witnessed the best version of Toxic in existence. I’m going to form a karaoke team and we are going to win everything,” she informed them.

“Aunt May played Celtic Women for fifteen minutes,” Peter offered her in return for this information, “All the old people sung along.” It had been cute in a weird, hippie kind of way.

They conceded that MJ was in the cool car.

They looked up to Karen dragging Matt away from one of the benches with both her fists wrapped in his sweatshirt while Foggy watched them from the car. They decided it was time to go, but tasked MJ with the important job of recording the cool car’s drama to share once they got to the campsite.

 

 

They got to the campsite and started hauling everything into one of the two cabins they’d rented. There was two rooms with three beds and a sofa in each cabin, and Peter and Ned managed to twist the DD trio’s arms (it didn’t take much twisting, Foggy and Karen heard about the Celtic Women incident) into letting them stay with them. Wade had the choice of staying with the old people (because he was an old people, let’s be real) or sleeping on the sofa in their cabin.

Foggy said if he knew what was good for him he’d build a shelter in the woods. Peter thought that Wade wasn’t above doing that. He’d probably have a great time with it, too. Matt said that if Wade slept with them he was not responsible for his behavior after dark.

Matt wandered around the rooms, bumping into shit and swearing for the first five minutes or so. Foggy explained that he was distracted by the sounds of nature. Karen said he was distracted because whoever had cleaned the cabin had gone heavy on the Pinesol. Matt reappeared on the porch to announce that the place reminded him of Danny Rand’s obsession with training in the outdoors, that he hated everything that was happening there, and that he wanted to go home. Foggy told him to help them unload the car and he went without further complaint.

Karen told them that he just had to get it all out before he settled into it. He did the same thing with every new bar they tried.

Once everything was settled, Aunt May corralled everyone to go on a short hike to see the nearby pools of water before they started on dinner. Peter knew that this involved mediation and prepared himself accordingly. He attempted to help Ned and MJ prepare accordingly, but they didn’t know how to meditate. Foggy and Karen did not know how or want to know how to meditate. They declared that a Matt-thing and categorized it under all his other “health-nut ninja bullshit.”

They really had picked the right cabin.

 

 

Matt had never been a hike before, which was actually kind of tragic. And that wasn’t exactly the easiest trail in the world start with, Peter thought. Foggy, however, didn’t seem too concerned for his bestie.

“I did so much reading,” he enthusiastically told Matt, who was very interested in the noise the dragonflies were making. Foggy had to keep grabbing and pulling him away from the edge of the stream by his hoodie. “I was originally planning on doing this Madeleine style; it’s perfect because you too, my friend, are a mischievous red-head, but the people online said—hey, Matty focus here—actually maybe we should do this Madeleine style.”

Matt had already abandoned them for trying to figure out where the rushing water was coming from. Karen patted at Foggy sympathetically.

“You tried, Fogs, that’s what counts.”

“Fine, fall in, asshole, see if I care,” Foggy called after Matt’s back. He paused for a second, then grimaced and took off after him. It was better not to tempt fate.

 

 

They got to the pools earlier than Aunt May’s group because Karen was an experienced hiker from Vermont and was much more interested in the journey than the destination. Not unlike Matt who was physically incapable of staying on the trail. Foggy eventually gave in trying to keep up with either of them and assigned Karen the task of fetching Matt down from whatever tree he’d climbed when they caught up with him.

Foggy squinted at Peter suspiciously.

“Are you going to go super-heroing off, too?” he asked. He had enough rope to make multiple leashes, Peter was certain of that and the veiled threat.

“No, I’m here to commune with nature,” he assured him. Foggy raised an eyebrow but was distracted by Matt and Karen emerging out of the brush and heading straight for the pools.

“Kare, he ain’t going in there by himself,” he warned. He certainly didn’t.

May’s group arrived just in time to help fish Matt and Karen out of the pools.

 

 

Matt was an excellent meditator and fit right into May’s troop of hippies as they all sat by the edge of the water and allowed the sounds to wash over them. Foggy and Karen put in a great effort. MJ didn’t even try.

They sat in stillness for a good ten or fifteen minutes when a clattering rustle came upon them and scared the shit out of everyone.

It was Wade. He looked much more like a soldier than a camper. The set in his brow completed the look. He didn’t say how he’d found them, just immediately went to harass Matt over his “cute real-people clothes.” Matt shoved him into the pools and took the resulting scolding without even a hint of remorse.

Aunt May said it was this type of behavior that was probably throwing off their karma. Peter and MJ and Ned looked at each other knowing that she was exactly correct and that the chances of either party stopping were next to nil.

“You’re a lawyer, you know right from wrong,” May lectured Matt when Foggy was done with him. “The universe is trying to help you see that.”

“I’m also clinically depressed,” Matt told her helpfully, “But I’ve disguised myself very carefully in a suit and almost no one has found me out yet.”

 

 

Wade declared the cabins unfit for habitation on the grounds that they were poorly defendable. He did indeed wander off into the nearby trees to make a shelter. Or at least, he tried to. Matt found out about his fear of Aunt May from Peter and went crashing out after him into the woods to lord it over him. He dragged him back and forced him to choose between the couch in their cabin or the bed in Aunt May’s. Wade predictably chose the couch and Matt rustled off in glee again. Karen went after him to make sure he wasn’t mauled by a bear or something.

While she was off doing that, Peter took his friends over to Aunt May’s cabin where they bundled sage and sorted through many people’s crystal collections. They wrapped bananas in foil to be tossed on the fire later for dessert.

Once the sun started getting low, Aunt May sent the kids out to gather kindling. They were unexpectedly joined by Wade.

Wade had opinions on kindling.

“No, no, no,” the expert said, “they have to be dry, children. _Dry_. These are wet. These are leaves. These are logs.” He dug through their armloads until they were left only with sticks. Then he set off grumpily to find some appropriately sized larger sticks to add to their bundles.

“Deadpool knows a lot about camping,” Ned said. MJ flipped Wade’s back off. He’d made her regather sticks twice.

“He used to be a soldier,” Peter told them, “And he’s Canadian.”

There was a murmur of understanding.  

 

 

Peter came back to find Matt glaring intensely at nothing. Foggy and Karen were going about their lives as though this was completely normal behavior and Peter hadn’t actually spent enough non-combative time with Matt to know whether it was or whether they were just indulging him. MJ crouched down next to him and tried to follow the direction of his glare.

“He’s listening to the fireflies,” Foggy told them. “Though, for the record, he doesn’t look at what he’s hearing, huh, Matty?”

No answer. He looked like a cat ready to strike out and grab one.

Peter regretted having that thought immediately. He might actually do that.

As soon as the regret started, Matt leapt off the deck and vanished. Foggy blinked a little after him, then shook his head knowingly and told the kids to help him take out the stuff for dinner to Aunt May’s cabin. Matt would come back when he was done with whatever he was screwing with. Aunt May happened to see him vanish and was concerned.

“He’ll be okay out there by himself in the dark?” she asked, accepting the basket of bread Foggy placed in her hands.

“Oh yeah. Dark doesn’t mean anything to him, he has no light perception,” Foggy told her reassuringly.

Aunt May was not reassured.

 

 

“So Pete tells me you’re Canadian,” she said conversationally to Wade as he attempted to teach the kids how to use a piece of flint and steel to make a spark. Peter was exceedingly bad at it. Ned was exceedingly good at it, he got a spark almost every time.

“That’s what it says on my passport, but I personally like to think I’m a citizen of the world,” Wade told her as he taught Ned how to get the baby fire burning. He revoked Ned’s fire-starting privileges after the sixth try. Wade then taught MJ how to do it. She was very proud of her baby fire, although she tried to hide it.

“Has the hematite been helping?” May asked.

“The what?”

Peter had never bothered explaining to Wade what the rocks were. Not even after he opened one of his suit pockets and the beads Peter had been slipping into it rained out all over one of their perps. He loved Wade, but he was old, and he wouldn’t remember. He couldn’t remember all the meme names and called them by their descriptions.

“The beads,” Peter clarified.

“Oh. Obviously. Totally. Helping so much. Doing their best. Wow, what a difference.”

He’d 100% already lost them.

 

 

Wade disproved of bananas for dessert, especially hot ones. He didn’t consider anything worth eating if there wasn’t a chance of ingesting carcinogens alongside it. This served as the most terrifying ghost story ever told to all the hippies present. Peter pointed out that ingesting carcinogens was redundant for him. The comment was respectfully acknowledged and ignored.

Karen remedied the situation by producing a jar of dulce de leche from absolutely nowhere and smearing some on her toasty banana. She offered the jar to Wade.

“You are a forest goddess,” he told her in awe. She tossed her hair into Matt’s face.

“What, like it’s a big deal?”

 

 

Peter had never been in a situation where he had to sleep anywhere near either Matt or Wade. It was a surreal experience. He was learning so much, and his face hurt from laughing so hard.

“We are never going to sleep tonight,” MJ whispered to him and Ned as they listened to the riot that was the triple act next door.

Matt had very strong opinions on the wearing of socks in bed. He was so much more of a crunchy-granola type of person than Peter had ever expected. He said things like “but how can you feel grounded with fabric between you and the floor?”

Cross-examination by Franklin Nelson Esq. revealed exceptions to this rule. Socks were allowed to be wore in any room in which the temperature was below 40 degrees. Socks were allowed to be worn during surgery. Babies were allowed to wear socks, _I guess, but at what cost?_

“What if you have bad circulation?” Karen offered, “Asking for a friend.”

“Then your friend should get better circulation,” Matt offered her right back. There was the distinct thump of someone being whacked with a pillow. Peter and Ned knew the noise intimately because MJ did it to them all the fucking time.

“Children, y’all wanna settle down before I strangle both of you?” Foggy threatened. The thumping paused, then continued double time.

“I didn’t even _do anything_ ,” Matt whined between the assaults.

It was heartening to know that even old people never really grew up.

 

 

Peter woke up to Wade banging pots and pans together declaring that it was time for breakfast. He burst into their room to throw open their curtains and then climb out the window.

Peter had to stare at the space for a few moments to process that, that had really just happened. He heard a scraping noise then a scream as the next-door bedroom window slammed open and Wade scrambled through it to provide the announcement to those guys as well.

“Oh wow,” Peter heard Aunt May say from the porch next door, “I wouldn’t have thought of doing it that way.”

 

 

Day two at camp was Peter’s favorite day because they were going to go on a long hike and do a little bit of bouldering. He now had an unfair advantage at bouldering but promised Aunt May he’d be a discreet, good sport about it. Foggy had never been bouldering and was a little wary of it. Matt thought bouldering sounded like slow parkour and was stoked to try, although he was informed that he had to keep the non-normative blind person behavior to a minimum around Aunt May’s friends.

Matt wanted to know if this might be remedied by him bouldering on the opposite side of the rocks from Aunt May’s friends. The answer was yes, but no, Matthew.

Wade was similarly informed. He said he didn’t need to boulder, he had big plans to go cave hunting. Matt was immediately willing to abandon the bouldering. Karen was similarly taken with cave hunting. Foggy developed a whole new set of things to be wary of.

They all hiked together to the end of the trail where the boulders were, then Team Adult Red split off to make Foggy’s nightmares a reality.

While they were off god knows where, Peter showed Ned and MJ how to climb boulders. They weren’t much good at it, but Peter promised them he’d catch them if they fell. It was nice to focus in on climbing for a while. It was sunny and a little windy. The rocks weren’t slippery. Getting to the top wasn’t as difficult as it had been in the past, so Peter dallied around a little bit, swinging off sometimes just because he could. It was a different kind of mediation. Aunt May joined him at the top and they waited in companionable silence for everyone else to get up there.

Once everyone was up, they settled down to rest and admire the view for a little while before heading back down.

 

 

Team millennial didn’t join them on the trail back and Peter started to get a little worried. MJ nudged him and reminded him that there were literally two super people wherever they were, so chances were that they were just fucking around, not hurt.

Aunt May gave Foggy and Karen a ring anyways to see if they were okay.

They didn’t answer, but she put it down to bad signal. The group decided that if the four of those guys didn’t show up in a couple hours, they’d call in the emergency services. In the meantime, they would wait another half hour or so before heading back to the site. This gave everyone a chance to wander off and explore for a bit. Aunt May headed immediately toward the water with her best friend. Peter and Ned and MJ went the opposite direction, tumbling down a steep hill by accident and stumbling upon (and almost into) a quiet part of the stream that ran through the area. There were little fish in the spaces between the rocks and the three of them found a huge dead tree bridge lying across the deeper parts. Across it was a meadow and then a dense area of trees. They saw a few deer and some gophers and some birds and some truly majestic fungi, then they took their nerdy asses back to the meeting point.

The spelunkers hadn’t returned yet, so the rest of the party went back to the campsite.

 

 

Team Where-the-Fuck-Have-You-Been showed up about an hour before dinner. Foggy said nothing to anyone and went immediately to take a shower.

“We saw bats!” Karen told them excitedly. “Big fuckers with the wings!” She demonstrated. “And then we saw like a million breeds of roach and Matt freaked the fuck out.”

“They sound like the ocean,” Matt told them all, equally as pumped as Karen. “But also like grass.”

“So many legs!” Karen reminded him.

“So many,” he agreed.

It was pretty understandable why Foggy hated the world at that moment. His two best friends were basically giant, demented cats.

“Did you have fun?” Peter asked Wade. He grinned hugely at him.

“For a second there, we all became Batman,” he said. This reminded Karen and she screamed in joyous agreement. “Dropped a rock and they all just took the fuck off. Fucking incredible.”

Oh god. Poor Foggy.

 

 

Dinner was hot dogs and to-furkey dogs and another vegan option which Peter was pretty sure was just a boiled carrot. Regardless, it was good and well earned. Dessert was s’mores which Matt would have nothing to do with. He wasn’t all that into the marshmallows either. Wade made a marshmallow chocolate monstrosity the width of his hand and tried to feed it to MJ.

She gave him a dead knee and Peter thought Wade was maybe a little impressed.

 

 

That night saw Matt and Karen apologizing to Foggy while he told them he was glad they had fun, but that he would never in his life go cave diving again. Matt pestered him until he admitted that it _had_ felt a little like Batman when the colony there had flown out around them, although Foggy qualified this by saying he finally understood why Bruce Wayne had been scared of bats.

Matt wanted to find an above-ground cave, one with water in it like he remembered from movies when he was a kid. There was an argument over geography and whether this type of cave was more likely to be found around fresh or salt water.

Peter was elected resident science officer and was interrogated for answers. Peter knew exactly fuck-all about geography and passed the buck to Ned who knew the geography of every Star Wars planet, but nothing about Earth. MJ told them they were all dumb and looked it up on her phone.

They came to the conclusion that they all needed to go to New Mexico to experience the caverns there.

 

 

Wade told ghost stories out on the porch before they went to bed and that was a bad decision. It was a bad decision to let Wade tell stories to begin with, but it was a worse decision because Wade was a phenomenal story-teller. Peter was pretty sure he was hitting on every trope which might make Matt panic.

He succeeded.

He told a story about a bride somewhere up north who had fallen asleep the night before her wedding day. She woke up paralyzed and couldn’t move. Her family and her new groom found her and thought she was dead. Her skin got cold and stiff while she was still awake, and she started to think that maybe she was a ghost, stuck in purgatory forever. But then her would-be husband built her a coffin, telling everyone that it was the least he could do for his bride. After he made it, he leaned over her and grinned, then he shut her eyes and buried her.

Not a single person in anyone’s party wanted to sleep after that shit.

Every time he closed his eyes, Peter thought about suffocating blackness and resolved that it was fine, he didn’t need to sleep.

Ned sat up in the bunk under him and decided the same.

MJ slept like a baby, the monster.

 

 

Peter eventually must have passed out because he woke up and screamed because he wasn’t buried in his wedding dress. MJ stopped hitting him with the pillow to tell him that “this is why no bitch needs a wedding.”

She exacted the same punishment on Ned, then flounced out to go help the people in the kitchen with breakfast.

 

 

Day three was the last one before they headed back to the city and they were going to the lake for most of the day. They got their shit together, piled into the cars and headed off for water. MJ reported that Karen had built a spectacular playlist the night before while she was trying to ward off sleep. The DD trio had then played an exciting game of “rank everyone who you have ever slept with from 1 to fucking 30, Matthew, Jesus is disa-fucking-pointed in you.”

“You’ve slept with 30 people?” Peter asked Matt in awe at the rest stop.

Matt snorted.

“I haven’t slept with thirty people,” he said. Then he wandered off to go bother Karen.

Peter, Ned, and MJ were left with only more questions. Was that a derisive snort? A humorous one? Had he slept with less? Had he slept with _more_?

 

 

Everyone was exhausted by the sun and the swimming on the ride home and passed right the fuck out after dinner. In the morning, they packed everything back up, reloaded the cars and headed for home.

 

 

Aunt May, having gotten her nature fix, was tickled pink that Matt and Wade had joined them and wanted to invite them to places with them in future. She said they were both hilarious, although completely lost causes on the karma/fortune front.

Peter said that that was kind of her, but he was pretty sure Matt and Wade had gotten their fill of being out on vacation with each other and real humans for a while to come. She told him to extend a standing offer next time he went out anyways.

He did and was met with trepidation and so many qualifiers that he couldn’t pick out the meanings of the sentences they were spewing.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> there is no way matt has slept with 30 people, I'm clarifying here that he hasn't I promise
> 
> For the record, many websites for blind hikers suggest tying a rope between yourself and sighted friend, but I couldn't actually see Matt staying on the trail with his buddy like a well-behaved human being, so that wouldn't work for him. The white stick would have been sufficient for him if he really needed it.


End file.
